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Russia expressed outrage on Friday over a "frenzied anti-Russian campaign" by U.S. media and political analysts, stepping up a war of words that has intensified during the Ukraine crisis.

Ties between Moscow and Washington have sunk to their lowest level since the Cold War over the crisis in Ukraine, and each side has accused the other of waging an information war.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said "propagandists" working on orders from Washington were producing "Russophobic lampoons, carefully building an image of Russia as an enemy, instilling hatred of anything Russian in ordinary people."

The West accuses Russia of backing separatists in east Ukraine by providing them with weapons and troops, and Russia says the West plotted the overthrow of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev last year. Each side denies the accusations.

Washington imposed sanctions on Moscow after it annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in March last year and stepped them up after the separatist rebellion began in east Ukraine the following month.

The two nuclear powers and veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council are also at odds over many other international matters and differ on human rights and democracy issues.